Today was a long day, I was up at 6:15a to catch a bus from Lake Oswego, OR to downtown Portland, then to Portland Airport to meet a cloud computer operations director to introduce him to some ideas that enable adapting to changes if you adopt evolutionary economics ideas.

Evolutionary economics deals with the study of processes that transform economy for firms, institutions, industries, employment, production, trade and growth within, through the actions of diverse agents from experience and interactions, using evolutionary methodology.

The data center is ready for a transformation. Cloud computing is helping to push things in a direction, but there is much more beyond cloud computing.

The thought experiment we went through is what happens if the data center industry adopts an information sharing methodology as opposed to an information hoarding, accelerating change in the industry, asking tough questions of what problems should a data center be solving. Being open to discover new ways to look at the problems and ask new questions, driving more innovation.

Here is a bit more explanation of evolutionary economics.

Ideas are articulated in language and thus transported into the social domain. Generic ideas, in particular, can bring about cognitive and behavioral processes, and in this respect they are practical and associated with the notion of ‘productive knowledge’. It is generic ideas that evolve and form causal powers underlying the change. Evolutionary economics is essentially about changes in generic knowledge, and involves transition between actualized generic ideas. Actual phenomena, being manifestations of ideas, are seen as ‘carriers of knowledge’.

Three analytical concepts corresponding to ontological axiomatics are thus: